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IF you can take your eyes off of Robert Downey Jr. in blackface when you see Ben Stiller’s war-flick spoof “Tropic Thunder,” you’ll notice the film-within-a-film’s spectacularly inept director, Damian Cockburn, sending his actors into the jungle. He’s played by Steve Coogan, who’s been a household name in the UK for more than a decade and has made a career out of playing arrogant jerks in way over their heads.

US moviegoers probably know him best for playing smarmy record-label honcho Tony Wilson in the 2002 indie hit “24 Hour Party People.” He also turned up as a feisty Roman centurion in another Stiller flick, “Night at the Museum,” as well as Larry David’s astonishingly inept therapist in “Curb Your Enthusiasm.”

On Friday, Coogan stars in the absurdist comedy “Hamlet 2,” in which he plays Dana Marschz, a down-and-out high-school theater teacher who has no idea just how untalented he is.

Dana’s big idea: Stage a modern-day, musical version of “Hamlet” that imagines what would have happened had the maudlin hero survived. Without revealing too much, we can tell you that the big closing number is a tune called, “Rock Me, Sexy Jesus.”

Coogan took the part simply because the script made him laugh. “I’m a pretty tough audience,” he says. “I like to do something that has a brain, but not so much so that it vanishes up its own ass.”

Speaking of being out there, Coogan’s also about to embark on a European stand-up tour, incorporating all of his telly characters, including Tommy Saxondale, a hairy ex-roadie with a philosopher’s bent.

“I’m doing huge, 10,000-seat arenas. It’s really scary,” Coogan says. To add a cherry on top, London’s Guardian newspaper recently named his production company, Baby Cow, one of the UK’s “Most Powerful Celebritymakers.” So, since he’s got all this great stuff going on back home, why is he bothering with often-infuriating Hollywood politics?

“Do you know what? I don’t need to is the fact,” he answers. “To me, it’s all upside. If they don’t like me and think I’m terrible, I’ll just go home. I’m just going to enjoy the ride.”

But Coogan feels there’s a mainstream Yankee audience over here.

“There are some commonalities to British and American humor,” he says. “Oddly, much more so than Europe, which is just 22 miles away from us. We’ve got a strange dual-identity relationship with America: We criticize it for not being as cultured as we are as Europeans, but at the same time we’re totally in love with Hollywood and sunshine.

“In LA, you can be who you want to be – I have anonymity,” he adds. “I can go to the cinema, I can stare at all the different types of multivitamins in the shop for as long as I want to, and no one will think I’m weird. And when I do get recognized, it tends to be in the cool record stores, by the arty types. It’s kind of nice to be the new guy in town – I feel a bit young! Now I find myself going back to the UK and defending America, which I never thought I’d do.”

His toe-dip into Tinseltown has already started raising awareness here. Last week, Page Six reported that Coogan was hanging out at Hugh Hefner’s notorious Midsummer Night’s Dream Party, hitting on starlets in the grotto.